"The most good you can do": Effective altruism vs. mutual aid

We close our course on mutual aid with a comparison to and examination of Silicon Valley's favorite form of modern activism: Effective Altruism.

This is part of a series on mutual aid. You can view the whole series here. If you’re not interested in this series, you can stay subscribed to the newsletter but not to future articles on mutual aid here.

Last week, I was working on creating a mutual aid resource page as a way of wrapping up this series, and for a second, it crossed my mind that I might point people towards the charity GiveDirectly as a way of engaging in mutual aid. GiveDirectly is a nonprofit based primarily out of East Africa that does something unusual: rather than providing specific goods or services, it simply gives money directly to people living in extreme poverty without any conditions put upon what they do with the money.

GiveDirectly has been unusually open with their data, offering it to economists and academics, who, upon studying it, have found that it is a remarkably effective form of giving: turns out, when you give poor people money, they know better than rich westerners how best to spend it to improve their situation. The condescending rich person argument against this form of giving is “they’ll just blow it all on booze” or on some other poor person stereotype (rich people, of course, never spend their money on silly bullshit.) But the data shows that this doesn’t happen all that often.

Obviously, this shares some characteristics with mutual aid — because the giving is unconditional, it has an element of trust underlying it. “We’re giving you this money, we trust that you’ll use it in the way you need to.” It also lacks some of the condescension of many other charities, which assume that they understand a poorer person’s life situation better than the person themselves does.

But I couldn’t include it on my resource page. This is because GiveDirectly does not operate out of the theoretical framework of mutual aid, but out of something called “effective altruism.” Effective altruism (EA) has become an increasingly popular social movement in the 21st century, as it bills itself as a way to do “the most good for the most people,” and because it does not demonize having tons of money, so long as you give lots of that money away. EA is also closely tied to the increasingly popular idea of Universal Basic Income.

These ideas, while compelling, are not radical in the sense that mutual aid and its parent ideology, anarcho-communism, are. So as we wrap up this course, it seems to be worth our time to look at mutual aid through the lens of a competing ideology.